Posts by Zolko 1377 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Nov 2010
@Gary : no sarcasm, it's the old story of the Baron von Münchhausen lifting himself out of moving sands by pulling himself by his own hair. Or a perpetum mobile where an electric motor drives a generator which powers the electric motor. Let's see whether OpenAI has managed to cheat on the laws of physics. I just hope we have enough popcorn to enjoy the spectacle
Like Trump, they hate the EU
no, WE hate what the EU has BECOME, mostly since the Lisabon treaty from 2008. Before that and the 1/2 yearly rotating presidency, the EU was the biggest anarchist organisation in the world. Since then, it has become a corrupt centralised bureaucratic self-serving gang of warmonger banksters. Read your history books, we Europeans have never accepted such dictatorships for very long ... and those dictators had often quite a painful end of rule
Orbán is as much Hungary as Blair is the United Kingdom. A war criminal that has blown up the middle-east causing millions of deaths with lies and corruption ... so put him behind bars before lecturing other countries about their politicians. Viktor Orbán hasn't caused the death of a single person to my knowledge.
@Eric 9001 : you should have used the "Pedantic" icon
Linux need GNU and therefore "most distros" is incorrect - it's all distros
wrong : you can make a Linux computer with busybox and no GNU component
PS : is it my browser or did El Reg change the default font ? It's much thinner, less readable
yep, I had the same thoughts. I just tried the following prompt in ChatGpt :
$ hello, how do you explain that, on the 11 september 2001, the 2 World Trade Center towers fell at free-fall speed exactly in their own footprint, as during a professional demolition ?> Your request was flagged as potentially violating our usage policy. Please try again with a different prompt.
after that, talk about Tienanmen censorship !
ZhuQue-3 launched successfully on its maiden flight ... and successfully reached orbit
What a gang of loser engineers ! Everyone knows by now that a successful development procedure is to blow up the rocket because that's how good engineers learn to improve their stuff. How are the Chinese supposed to know what's wrong if it reaches orbit at first attempt?
Lets be honest here...
yes please "lets" : are you the same Anonymous Coward that posts lengthy messages here – 3 so far – saying so many bad things about the current X11 ?
X11 is broken though, in many waysX11 has had huge amounts of time to get this implemented / fixed...but some stuff related to this will just never be fixed...patches exist, but upstream won't pull them in
Wayland is faster than X11, there is no comparison there
this stinks of a RedHat manager trying his (or her, I don't care) propaganda : lets be honest, are you a RedHat manager ? How come you are so passionate and knowledgeable, and yet anonymous, on this subject ?
it causes a build-up of heat, which overheats or melts the control wiring and processors
I'm sure that's the selling-point, but for that, you need first to blow through the shell. Make that shell shiny and good heat conductor to dissipate the local heat buildup – like aluminium – and your laser is suddenly useless. Have you ever touched aluminium seats in the burning sun ? They're actually cool.
in order to hit you, it has to fly towards you
so ... this expensive high-tech device's only role is to protect itself while it's useless to protect sites nearby ? That's genius marketing !
Also, the harder you make the drone problem, the more expensive and complex the drones have to be
again, I'm sure that's the selling point, and again I think that's genius marketing : produce some expensive whizz-bang laser right from James Bond, pretending that it's very expensive because it will make the other side even more expensive and you can have a lifetime of easy money. It doesn't even need to do anything useful, but it must be Flash Gordon-ish and you're set. And if some drunken Russian comes with a cheap weapon that turns circles around your device, pretend that they were lucky and propose an even more expensive device, that'll teach those barbarians.
the purpose of some military equipment is not to win wars but to make some people rich. So if a company can convince clueless politicians that it has electrolytes inside and therefore it must be developed, built and deployed – but heaven forbid used in combat – then it's jackpot for them. If they can make that equipment sound complicated enough – sharks with lasers ? – so that everybody will say "they must have thought this out " then they have nothing to fear from public inspection. Remember the F-35 ?
Sorry, but as it happens I do work in adaptive optics – for astronomy – and concentrating a photon beam through kilometers of atmosphere is extremely difficult for stars, and they don't move ! And their light is feable, while a high-power laser will modify the atmosphere it goes through making adaptive optics very difficult.
DragonFire was able to shoot down high-speed drones
how exactly are drones shot down by a laser ? Lets assume that this device can target, follow, concentrate the laser beam through kilometers of atmospheric trubulence with adaptive optics, for several seconds on the exact same spot on the drone flying at 100m/s (that's 360km/h only, a slow drone), lets assume all that : what happens then ? I mean, a laser doesn't make anything explode like in Moonraker or StarWars, at best it burns a small hole through the composite shell of the drone. So what ?
The only useful scenario I can imagine if it burns its cameras making it blind, which would work against small FPS drones as used in Ukraine, but those are unlikely to target a military ship anywhere.
it was a conspiracy. If you want to see the proof of it, look and what the financial markets did the 4 weeks before the beginnings of the worldwide lockdowns and what happened the exact day when the lockdowns were announced.
HINT : the financial markets were in meltdown since mid-february 2020 because OPEC+ (mainly Russia and Saudi Arabia) refused to lower their petrol production, putting strains on US shale-oil producers who were all loosing money, putting pressure on margin-calls of the main investment firms. Meltdown beeing : all financial markets were down 40% in 4 weeks, something never seen ever, not even in 1929 or 2008. And when the lockdowns and subsequent saving of the real economy – because lockdowns – with helicopter money was announced on the week-end of 16th march, miracle : the financial markets recovered all their losses.
If it was a conspiracy, you have to ask cui bono : and you'll get the same usual suspects, the banksters.
@Liam : but you're not working for Microsoft, are you ? We have therefore a way to differentiate both of you
The picture of the chap standing in front of the leading tank means that those events won't be forgotten outside the PRC for generations
A Chinese official was asked that question and he replied : "You may have noticed that the man was not overrun by the tank ". So I actually think that, with 30 years of retrospect, the Chinese population doesn't feel too bad about their government even for those events.
Ah that little Bobby Tables. Apparently, they did learn how to sanitize their prompt inputs ... and in a funny way
covid19 did pretty well too. Governments had "secret defense commissions" ... why secret ? Did people think that the virus was reading newspapers and would adapt its "strategies" ? And yet, many people simply swallowed that idiocy, and still do (as the angry downvoters will demonstrate).
... or needs to deal with coordinate systems in 3D space, and the coder wants to use Euler angles because they're easy to understand but lead to guimbal lock. Instead of using quaternions, whose physical representation is nonexistent but with easy algorithms if you know what they do.
to ban associated accounts
do they want us to believe that Chinese governmental cybercrooks use regular Antropic accounts to carry out their "attacks" ? Are these the same sort of crooks where plane hijackers leave their half-burned passports in the rubble of free-falling skyscrappers ? Asking for a suspicious friend
I still think that the MX and antiX people ought to work with the Devuan team
+1
I'm still hesitating between Devuan 6 or MX 25 : I need KDE but I don't want systemd. Can I install MX 25 with XFCE and SysV init, and then install KDE on top of it ? Or is KDE tied to systemd even after install ? I couldn't find the answer in any documentation, so if you could mention this, Liam, would be very informative
1) may-be ... I just checked (I do have a Win11 laptop for work) and it doesn't show anything about "TaskView". Where is it hidden ? EDIT : there ARE multiple desktops, I've never noticed it because there is no "Pager" that shows them, it's a list of desktops. May-be they'll go all the way copying CDE and Win12 will have a proper desktop pager ?
2) KDE has virtual desktops AND "Activities ", which are different things
3) but whatever, the argument of this article is that it all comes from Win95 which didn't have anything approaching virtual desktops. That later Microsoft copied CDE (or KDE) and introduced some sort of multiple desktops doesn't save this article
no minimised windows (...), 4 virtual desktops
come to think of it, this is a very different paradigm than Win95 : with virtual desktops you don't need minimized windows and you can't have a taskbar because there are too many windows. And virtual desktops come from CDE. So not only is this a poor article but it's actually a false one : modern *nix desktops don't derive from Win95 but from CDE (or whoever invented virtual desktops). Some default shipments might have a Win95 look – I wouldn't know because I recycle my setting at each new install – but that's only cosmetics.
Yes, this !
My KDE desktop doesn't look and behave like anything Win95 did :
It has no task bar (but an overall presentation when pushing the mouse into a corner) , no minimised windows (yes I roll them up too), 4 virtual desktops (windows still doesn't have those and I couldn't live without those) , a CDE-like floating Dock but on the left of the screen, a secondary panel for cpu and memory usage on top, window buttons are on the left like MacOS, selecting and then middle-button pastes into anything including terminal (no ctrl-c / ctrl-v) ....
Liam, this was quite a poor article
I don't know why MX is going systemd either. I have the 23 version (Debian 12) on my laptop, and my uptimes are measured in months ! (I tend to reboot every month) And this laptop sees external screens, mouses, hard-drives, all sorts of networks, sound, bluetooth, it goes into sleep (I don't do hibernate) and wakes up reliably .... I don't know who thought that this venerable SysV-init must go.
Well, I understand that people with thousands of servers can benefit from systemd ... but then offer that as an option and don't try to ram that down the throat of everybody !
The 3-day SMO (I know you don't like it when people call it that...ODHSNM) was supposed to see all significant Ukrainian resistance overcome in three days
and exactly that happened. Russia entered Ukraine as a troll into a virgin, and they wanted to use that demonstration of force to convince NATO to stop meddling in Ukraine. Similarly to the Cuban crisis, do you remember that ? Then, when the Istanbul negotiations started, 2 weeks later, Russia retreated from some areas to show their goodwill and end the war (SMO, sorry), but the UK prime minister Brian Johnson torpedoed that accord as is documented everywhere, and that's the pojnt when the SMO transformed into the current war.
So the entire fault of the current slaughtering of Ukrainian men in uniforms is on UK/NATO : without those interventions it would all be over since a long time, without the millions of Ukrainian dead and destruction. And remember : this is not the first time that UK is responsible for a war with its millions of casualties, that happened also for the 2003 Irak war when then-prime minister Blair sided with Cheney's and Wolfowitz's lies.
I can't understand how British can try to whitewash themselves from their war-crimes.
Yes, Russia wanted Ukraine to surrender unconditionally, and that's what is going to happen anyway.
You need to try all options (e.g. gradient, random, nelder-mead)
you forgot genetic algorithms. They get very fast to a very good global optimum, and don't get trapped in local minima. It's also quite easy to code. For problems with large number of parameters, this is the best algorithm I've seen.
I think only 54% of them voted to leave Russia and join Ukraine when it held its legal and mutually agreed referendum to leave the Soviet Union. But we'll never know
logic is not your strength I see ? You pretend that we don't know something that you acknowledges yourself ! Of course we know that Crimeans don't want to be Ukrainian since Crimeans have voted repeatedly to be tied to Russia and not Ukrainia, as you observe yourself.
Whilst under occupation of an invading army
actually no, the Russian army was already in Crimea, as part of an agreement about the Sevastopol military base, they were not "invading" or "occupying" anything, their presence was perfectly legal. All that the Russian military did was to tell the Ukrainian military to stay in their bases and not meddle with the referendum
She did not call 911 her Husband did
I saw that too : why arrest someone for a crime committed by someone else ? (even if that other someone claims that he did it because the first someone did something unexpected). And why all the downvotes : difficulty in reading/understanding ?
shortage of gas turbines
do you know what the main material of gas turbines is ? Titanium, because it is very strong and very heat resistant. Do you know what country is the main producer/exporter of titanium ?
At some point, the only thing one can consider is the stupidity of the western politicians who sanction the exact countries it is at war with and which provide the very materials – titanium or rare earth or otherwise – that the west needs to produce weapons to defeat the very enemy that provide the materials needed to make war with ... the very enemy.
And we didn't even begin to talk about pure silicium wafers to produce the very chips or the very solar panels .... or the uranium bars that the very enemy ... the only question that I don't have answers for is : do we deserve these "leaders" (leader = führer in German, literally) or did we at some point take the wrong turn ?
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
